Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

11 INFECTION CONTROL 5 states with highest flu shot rates in 2019-20 By Mackenzie Bean R hode Island had the highest flu vaccination rate in the U.S. during the 2019-20 flu sea- son, according to a ranking from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The ranking is based on data from the CDC's 2019-20 influenza season vaccination coverage dashboard. During the 2019-20 season, 51.8 percent of Amer- icans older than 6 months were vaccinated against the flu. This figure is slightly up from a year prior, when 49.2 percent of Americans got vaccinated. Five states with the highest flu shot rates in 2019-20: 1. Rhode Island — 60.9 percent 2. Connecticut — 60.7 percent 3. Massachusetts — 60.6 percent 4. Virginia — 58.8 percent 5. South Dakota — 58.7 percent n 2 in 5 Americans likely to attend large holiday gathering amid COVID-19 By Erica Carbajal N early 40 percent of Americans are likely to attend a holiday gathering with more than 10 people, despite COVID-19, according to a nationally representative survey of 2,047 adults. Columbus-based OSU Wexner Medical Center published the survey findings in early November. Most respondents said they plan to take precautionary measures in light of COVID-19, according to survey results shared with Becker's: • Eighty-two percent will ask attendees who have COVID-19 symp- toms not to come to holiday celebrations. • Seventy-nine percent will celebrate with household members only. • Seventy-three percent will follow social distancing guidelines. • Sixty-seven percent will ask guests to wear masks. • Sixty-two percent will invite/attend a gathering with no more than 10 close family members. "We're going to look back at what happened during this holiday season and ask ourselves, 'Were we part of the solution or were we part of the problem?'" said Iahn Gonsenhauser, MD, chief quality and patient safety officer at OSU Wexner. n 5,300 physicians, scientists: Herd immunity as virus management is a 'dangerous fallacy' By Molly Gamble T housands of scientists, researchers and healthcare professionals have signed the John Snow Memorandum denouncing herd immunity as "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence." e stance comes in response to the Great Barrington Declaration, authored by three epidemiologists in early October. Citing their concerns about the damaging physical and mental health effects of COVID-19 lockdown policies, the trio put forth an approach for virus control called "focused protection." e proposal aims to minimize mortality and so- cial harm by allowing young people to resume life as normal — including attending school and work in person — to build herd immuni- ty, while encouraging older people and those who are medically vulnerable to isolate. A group of international researchers with expertise in public health, epidemiology, medicine, pediatrics, sociology, virology, infectious disease, health systems, psychol- ogy, psychiatry, health policy and mathe- matical modeling came together to dra the John Snow Memorandum, which states that "any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed." "e arrival of a second wave and the realization of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired popula- tion immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. is is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence," the memo reads. e memorandum is named aer a British physician known as the "father of epidemiol- ogy" and oen credited with bringing an end to an 1854 cholera outbreak in London. It was first published in e Lancet. Its publication coincided with remarks from Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseas- es, who denounced the Great Barrington Declaration in an interview with Yahoo News, asserting that it would result in many avoidable deaths. "In our community, maybe a third of the population — depending on how you figure it — are vulnerable and would be prone to getting serious complications from COVID-19 disease," said Dr. Fauci. "You have the elderly, obese people, people with underlying conditions like heart disease, di- abetes and other conditions. If you let infec- tions rip, as it were, and say, 'Let everybody get infected that is going to be able to get infected, and then we'll have herd immunity,' — quite frankly that is nonsense. Anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous. What will happen, if you do that, by the time you get to herd immunity you will have killed a lot of people that would have been avoidable." n

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